Facebook Places prediction

Facebook is announcing something today. It’s some form of location-based blah social media stuff blah blah social graph blah blah thing. In short, everyone says Foursquare and Gowalla will be dead because FACEBOOK SMASH and the entire developed world will use Facebook’s offering over theirs. I doubt it. Put simply:

**Facebook Places will compete with Google Buzz, not Foursquare. It will work the same way that Twitter Locations works.**

Your identity lives with Facebook. Things like Twitter, Foursquare, Gowalla, etc. push structured data to Facebook. It just needs a way to organize location-based data (Places). Google is trying to come at the same space from the other direction: Maps, Latitude, Buzz.